Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

“You? Really?” Mathilde said, relenting, taking a sip of her wine.

The investigator smiled, and her teeth gleamed. “You’ll be less mad at me in a few minutes. I found some interesting stuff. Let’s just say your buddy’s got lots of friends. All at the same time.” She gestured at the envelope she’d given Mathilde and turned her face away.

Mathilde pulled out the photographs inside. How strange to see someone she had known for so long entangled like that. After she’d seen four pictures, she was shuddering, and it wasn’t from the cold. She went through all of them, resolute. “Excellent work,” she said. “This is repulsive.”

“Also expensive,” the investigator said. “I took you at your word when you said money was no object.”

“It isn’t,” Mathilde said.

The investigator came closer, touching Mathilde. “You know, your house surprised me. It’s perfect. Every detail. But so tiny for someone who has so much. It’s all light and planes and white walls. Shaker, almost.”

“I live monastically,” Mathilde said, meaning, of course, more. Her arms were crossed, wine in one hand, photographs in the other, but it didn’t stop the investigator, who leaned over the arm of the chair to kiss Mathilde. Her mouth was soft, searching, and when Mathilde smiled but didn’t kiss back, the woman went back down in her seat, and said, “Oh, okay. Sorry. Worth a shot.”

“You don’t have to be sorry,” Mathilde said, squeezing the other woman’s forearm. “Just don’t be a creep.”

—

YOU COULD STRING TOGETHER the parties Lotto and Mathilde had been to like a necklace, and you would have their marriage in miniature. She smiled at her husband down on the beach where the men were racing model cars. He was a redwood among pines, the light in his thinning hair, his laugh carrying past the waves, the music emanating mysteriously from the ceiling, the conversations among the women on the shaded veranda, drinking mojitos and watching the men. It was winter, freezing; they were all wearing fleeces. They pretended not to mind.

This party was near the end, though neither Mathilde nor Lotto knew it.

Just a lunch to celebrate Chollie and Danica’s upgrade in the Hamptons. Ten thousand square feet, live-in housekeeper, chef, and gardener. Stupid, Mathilde thought, their friends were idiots. With Antoinette gone, Lotto and she could buy this place many times over. Except that later, in the car, Lotto and she would laugh at their friends for this kind of idiotic waste, the kind he was raised within before his father kicked the bucket, the kind they both knew meant nothing but loud pride. Mathilde still cleaned both the country house and the apartment, she took out the garbage, she fixed the toilet, she squeegeed the windows, she paid the bills. She still cooked and washed up from the cooking and ate the leftovers for lunch the next day.

Unplug from the humble needs of the body and a person becomes no more than a ghost.

These women around her were phantom people. Skin taut on their faces. Taking three nibbles of the chef’s fine food and declaring themselves full. Jangling with platinum and diamonds. Abscesses of self.

But there was one woman there whom Mathilde didn’t know, and this woman was blessedly normal. She was brunette and freckled but wasn’t wearing makeup. Her dress was nice, but not fine. She had a wry expression on her face. Mathilde angled herself toward her.

Mathilde said, sotto voce, “One more word about Pilates, I’ll pop.”

The woman laughed silently, and said, “We’re all doing planks while the great American ship goes down.”

They talked about books, the bondage manual disguised as a novel for teenagers, the novel painstakingly pieced out of photos of street graffiti. The woman agreed that the new vegetarian restaurant in Tribeca that was all the rage was interesting, but said that a whole meal that revolved around the sunchoke had a certain sameness, plate to plate.

“They may want to consider other chokes. For instance, the arti,” Mathilde said.

“I think they’ve put too much consideration into the arty,” the woman said.

They kept taking tiny steps away from the others until they were alone by the steps. “I’m sorry,” Mathilde said. “I’m not sure I know your name.”

The woman sucked in her breath. She sighed. She shook Mathilde’s hand. “Phoebe Delmar,” she said.

“Phoebe Delmar,” Mathilde repeated. “Hoo boy. The critic.”

“The same,” she said.

“I’m Mathilde Satterwhite. My husband is Lancelot Satterwhite. The playwright. Right there. That big lunk with the superloud laugh whose plays you have eviscerated over the past fifteen years.”

“I was aware. Occupational hazard,” Phoebe Delmar said. “I tend to pop up at parties like a scolding aunt. My boyfriend brought me. I didn’t know you’d be here. I would never have ruined your fun with my presence.” She seemed sad.

“I always thought I’d deck you if I met you,” Mathilde said.

“Thank you for not doing so,” Phoebe said.

“Well. I haven’t decided definitively against it,” Mathilde said.

Phoebe put her hand on Mathilde’s shoulder. “I never mean to cause pain. It’s my job. I take your husband seriously. I want him to be better than he is.” Her voice was earnest, sweet.

“Oh, please. You say that as if he’s sick,” Mathilde said.

“He is. Great American Artistitis,” Phoebe Delmar said. “Ever bigger. Ever louder. Jostling for the highest perch in the hegemony. You don’t think that’s some sort of sickness that befalls men when they try to do art in this country? Tell me, why did Lotto write a war play? Because works about war always trump works about emotions, even if the smaller, more domestic plays are better written, smarter, more interesting. The war stories are the ones that get the prizes. But your husband’s voice is strongest when he speaks most quietly and clearly.”

She looked at Mathilde’s face and took a step back, and said, “Whoa.”

“Lunch!” Danica called, ringing a great brass bell on the porch. The men picked up the model cars, ground out the cigars, came trudging up the dune, their khakis rolled to their knees and their skin pink with cold wind. They sat at a long table with their plates heaped from the buffet. Space heaters disguised as shrubbery exhaled warmth. Mathilde sat between Lotto and Samuel’s wife, who was showing her photos of their new baby — Samuel’s fifth child — on her cell phone. “Lost a tooth on the playground, that monkey,” she said. “She’s only three.”

Down at the end of the table, Phoebe Delmar was listening wordlessly to some man whose voice was so loud, bits of his conversation were audible all the way to Mathilde. “Problem with Broadway these days is that it’s for tourists … only great playwright America has produced is August Wilson… don’t go to theater. It’s only for snobs or people from Boise, Idaho.” Phoebe caught her eye, and Mathilde laughed at her salmon steak. God, she wished she didn’t like the woman. It would make things so much easier.

“Who’s that lady you were talking to?” Lotto said in the car.

She smiled at him, kissed his knuckles. “I never caught her name,” she said.

When Eschatology was performed for the first time, Phoebe Delmar loved it.

In six weeks, Lotto would be dead.

—

I HAD OFTEN SAID that I would write, The Wives of Geniuses I Have Sat With. I have sat with so many. I have sat with wives who were not wives, of geniuses who were real geniuses. I have sat with real wives of geniuses who were not real geniuses…. In short I have sat very often and very long with many wives and wives of many geniuses. Gertrude Stein wrote this in the voice of her partner, Alice B. Toklas. Stein being, apparently, the genius: Alice apparently the wife.